Zach Wilson is not the only young QB to fail early
Denver Broncos quarterbacks coach Davis Webb, left, chats with quarterback Zach Wilson as he takes part in drills at training camp on July 30 in Centennial, Colo. Credit: AP/David Zalubowski
Zach Wilson will return to MetLife Stadium with the Broncos on Sunday to man the very same position he played at the end of his tenure with the Jets.
He’ll be on the bench.
Wilson, waived by the Jets in the offseason and signed by the Broncos, is one of the two backup quarterbacks behind rookie starter Bo Nix. And while he probably won’t have much of an impact on this game, there is at least one former teammate who is looking forward to welcoming him back.
“I still keep tabs on him, keep in touch here and there,” Aaron Rodgers said this past week. “I love Zach, and I always looked at him like a little brother. I enjoyed our time together on and off the field, and I wish him all the success. I was really happy for him the way he finished up preseason and I think this will be a good year for him to kind of reset and hopefully he gets an opportunity down the road.”
If that does happen — and there still are plenty of reasons and legit reservations why it might not ever take place — he certainly won’t be the first Jets quarterback who failed early in his career, was thrown away and resurfaced elsewhere to find success.
In fact, there are two quarterbacks of currently undefeated teams who fit the same profile: Geno Smith with the Seahawks and Sam Darnold with the Vikings.
Another unlikely unbeaten quarterback this season is Justin Fields with the Steelers, who was jettisoned by the Bears in favor of first overall pick Caleb Williams.
Then there is Baker Mayfield. And Kirk Cousins. Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford who actually traded spots in a rare win-win for both the players and their teams.
While it is fun to focus mostly on the young hotshot draft picks and monitor their waves of success and failure, the league is full of high-profile and highly-to-moderately successful quarterbacks who for one reason or another were given up on by a previous team. Heck, even Rodgers himself can fall into that category. The Jets didn’t exactly have to pry him away from the Packers.
It all exposes a glaring hole in the way not just the Jets but NFL teams in general go about their business with what undisputedly is the most important position in the sport. There is a lack of patience when it comes to nourishing the quarterbacks they draft.
“As a whole, there is not enough emphasis put on the organization’s role in the development of the position,” Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell — who is reaping the rewards of Darnold’s latest renaissance while the rookie he drafted, J.J. McCarthy, is out for the season with a knee injury — said this past week on “The Rich Eisen Show.” “I believe organizations fail young quarterbacks before young quarterbacks fail organizations.”
Hall of Famer Troy Aikman is worried by the trend.
“There are a lot of quarterbacks, and I believe I would have been one of them, but there are a lot of quarterbacks who come into this league who are really talented who just get put in a really bad situation and leave the game regarded as a bust,’’ Aikman said. “If we had continued to do the things we were doing when I first came into the league, I would have been one of those guys regarded as a bust.”
Whether or not Wilson and Darnold and Smith were failed by the Jets or vice versa certainly is debatable. But here’s a thought exercise: Would the Jets have made the playoffs at any point in the last three seasons, given their defensive performances, if they had stuck with Darnold rather than drafting Wilson? There’s probably more than a pretty good chance.
Ironically, the coach who helped push Darnold out the door in favor of Wilson is one of the more passionate believers in sticking with such players. Robert Saleh was an adamant defender of Wilson during his first draft pick’s short, disappointing tenure here, and he continues to be one.
“I still stand here and believe that he’s going to have a hell of a career and he’s going to get an opportunity and be a very successful quarterback in this league,” Saleh said this past week. “Sometimes you get thrown in the fire and you’re trying to learn, but there’s no patience for learning. You’re expected to run right out of the womb and speak five languages, but it takes time, especially coming from the college game, which is so different now compared to the NFL game in terms of what quarterbacks are asked to do.”
Ideally, of course, Wilson would not have played at all for the Jets last year and would have been afforded the opportunity to sit and watch and learn and grow if Rodgers had not been hurt on the first possession of the season. Wilson had to be called back to duty. Playing, it turned out, was what made him expendable.
At some point, perhaps, drafting quarterbacks will become the foolish approach to finding a championship-contending quarterback. In the last nine Super Bowls, the winning quarterback was a transplant from another team four times. That’s almost half. And the five titles won by homegrown quarterbacks were claimed by Tom Brady with his last two in New England and Patrick Mahomes with three in Kansas City, a pair of transcendent players.
Maybe the smarter play is to add a veteran with some measurable NFL skills and experiences rather than roll the dice on a 20-year-old kid.
“You are still drafting players off of potential,” O’Connell said, “and then everything that happens from that moment to when that potential becomes a reality is really on the organization if you have the right guy you are bringing in.”
So while Nick Foles polishes his ring after bouncing around the league, many of even the best quarterbacks drafted in the past decade — selections that no one would argue against, including Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Justin Herbert, Jordan Love and Dak Prescott — are all waiting to get to their first Super Bowl. Among them, only Jackson has even played in a conference championship game.
This year’s Jets team is the latest to try to win it all with a quarterback found not in April’s draft but in the league’s recycling bin. That’s what they are hoping for at least . . . even as their coach expresses a philosophical objection to the strategy.
“Hopefully we get to the point where we show a little grace with these young kids and give them a chance to develop rather than the other way around,” Saleh said. “Some people look at [drafting a quarterback] like a lottery ticket and some teams look at it like a long-term investment. I think the long-term investment is the only way to go.”
Meanwhile, the race is on to see who raises a trophy first: The Jets or one of their many former quarterbacks in the process of overcoming the unfortunate starts to their careers.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
